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OTTAWA—Many federal politicians have eaten crow after taking ill-considered stands on public policy.

Bob Sopuck may be the only one to have dined on raccoon.

It was, the new Conservative MP from Manitoba said, a rather tasty dish owing to the fact that the meal was at a party with fellow graduate students at Cornell University in upstate New York. The critters there are quite plump from all the corn they eat.

“The young ones taste the best,” he recounted in a 2008 radio interview. “You roast the hind legs and they’re mild and nice and fatty.”

If that bothers the animal rights crowd, then we’ll avoid mentioning the dishes of lynx, beaver, muskrat, snowshoe hare, goose, moose, elk and duck that Sopuck has killed and eaten over the years.

Instead, we’ll focus on the environment — an area of expertise the byelection winner from Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette has developed since writing his thesis, “Emigration of Juvenile Rainbow Trout in Cayuga Inlet,” in 1975.

Sopuck has been sitting in the House of Commons for just one month now. He’s still setting up his official office in the western Manitoba riding that just over 75,000 people call home.

Yet he’s already on the list of those rumoured to be tapped in a cabinet shuffle that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is planning, perhaps to set the stage for a spring election.

“Environment Minister Robert Sopuck” may have a nice ring to the rookie MP, but it will sound more like a declaration of war to the legions of activists, academics and critics trying to shift Conservative environmental policies, particularly on climate change.

Sopuck is known as the “right-wing environmentalist” — an alter ego he adopted after being introduced as such over the years by Winnipeg talk radio host Charles Adler, who said he found Sopuck “a rather pleasant anomaly.”

He says talk of climate change and the Kyoto agreement that commits rich countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions is “a dead-end thing,” but he tries to live off the lands as much as he can, eating only what he can grow or kill.

“I’m not suggesting that he thinks it was a great idea to give Al Gore a Nobel Prize or that he worships (David) Suzuki. He’s not part of any of those fads,” Adler said in an interview. “He’s all about the balance of nature.”

Sopuck, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has told it this way in a host of writings and radio appearances over the years.

He was raised in downtown Winnipeg but fell in love with life at the family cottage near Whiteshell Provincial Park, east of the city. His passion led him to the University of Manitoba, where he graduated with a bachelor of science degree in 1973. He did well enough to get a master’s degree from Cornell two years later.

He worked for a few years as a fisheries biologist for the provincial and federal governments before striking out on his own, running a grain and oilseed farm while consulting on environmental assessments and resource management in the province from 1979 to 1988.

Then he took his passion for the wilds a step further, purchasing a 195-hectare plot of land with new wife Caroline near the rural settlement of Lake Audy, named for Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader James Audy.

“I became a biologist and said ‘I don’t want to just study these things, I want to live out there.’ That’s kind of how it happened,” he told Adler in a 2005 radio interview. “It’s a natural evolution as far as I’m concerned.”

He lives in a log cabin and has developed “a deep spiritual connection” to the environment, he said in a 2007 interview with a Calgary radio station. “I try to hug a tree every day.”

But he eschews the emotional environmentalists who forecast doom and gloom.

“Those of us who are proud right-wing environmentalists, we always get accused of not caring about the environment when we actually criticize some of this stuff,” he told Adler in 2004. “But the claims that some of these people make are so outrageous that you basically have to take it with a grain of salt and look at conflicting evidence.”

He said in 2007 that upon being appointed by the federal Conservatives to the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, that “most environmental indicators in Canada have actually improved over the last 50 years.” That includes the quality of air, water and soil, though he admits there are “environmental hot spots that need to be fixed.”

There is no public record of his thoughts on the Alberta oilsands, where he worked last winter as a natural resources consultant.

“I would describe him more as a pragmatist,” said Glen Murray, Ontario’s minister of research and innovation and a former chair of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy.

“I think he’s a good environmental generalist. I think he’s very committed to the importance of reaching sustainability in the Canadian economy. I think he has a fairly realistic appreciation of how far away we are from that right now.”

Murray said appointees of all political stripes to the Round Table, which tackles the delicate issue of balancing economic growth with sustainable environmental practices, often end up with a sense of how urgent it is to cap Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions.

If Sopuck was touched in such a way, he will find it frustrating sitting in on Tory caucus meetings, Murray said. In Harper’s cabinet, the provincial Liberal said it could destroy Sopuck’s soul.

“If it isn’t a kiss of death having me cheering for him to be in cabinet, which it might be, I would do that,” Murray said.

Of course, Sopuck is not a totally new arrival to federal politics. As vice-president of policy for the Delta Waterfowl Foundation, a group of Canadian and American duck hunters, he has advocated on a range of issues from conservation to the federal long-gun registry.

It seems that the organization had some sway in the 2006 creation of the all-party Outdoor Caucus, whose mission, according to Tory MP Garry Breitkreuz, is to entrench fishing, hunting, trapping and shooting sports as acceptable activities.

Last summer, Sopuck was also credited by name — again by Breitkreuz — for supporting legislation to establish Sept. 23 as “National Hunting Trapping and Fishing Heritage Day.”

The bill passed into law on Dec. 16, one day after Sopuck took his seat in the House of Commons.

His influence within the government caucus is yet to be seen. So far, his only utterance has been a canned question to the minister of state for transport, which allowed the government to announce that, for the fifth straight year, Canada Post would waive parcel delivery charges on items destined for Canadian troops in Afghanistan this Christmas.

Adler, who professed to being “blown away” that Sopuck would enter federal politics, said he wished only one thing for his frequent interviewee and friend: That he not lose the spontaneity and the genuineness that has made him such an interesting individual and entertaining radio guest.

“I just hope that whatever’s ahead for him, the authentic Bob Sopuck doesn’t disappear because he could be quite the character, quite the icon.”

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